Hi, I'm Brett Martin. I'm a contributor to the New York Times magazine, and I live in New Orleans. I genuinely don't remember what made me search for my name on Spotify one day last summer. It's possible I was looking for a podcast I'd been on or maybe it was the search that we all do once in a while just to procrastinate or just out of vanity. In any event, I must never have done this particular search before because the first thing I saw was a song titled Brett Martin, You A Nice Man, Yes. And it had been up there for 11 years. Now, there are many Brett Martens in this world, several much more famous than I am. There's a Major League Baseball player, an Australian squash legend, some historical figures, but Obviously, I press play. At first, the words are generic enough. Brett Martin, you're a radio guy, you're a writer man, you're a reporter dude. Granted, these are somewhat uncannily like my life, but I'm just thinking this is hysterical. This is my new theme song.

Oh, Brett Martin, you're a wonderful person, you're a nice man. I read I'm really like you.

There's a line about, You tell good stories, and I think, This is fabulous. This is even more like me. But then a couple of really specific details stopped me in my tracks. Brett Martin, You cry on airplanes. You watch Sweet Home, Alabama, and you start to cry a lot.

Brett Martin, you cry on airplanes. You watch Sweet Home, Alabama, and you start to cry a lot. Brett Martin- Now, I worked on a story 20 years ago for this American life about crying on airplanes, and specifically about crying during the movie Sweet Home, Alabama.

At this point, my girlfriend and our daughters come into the room and I point at the screen and I say, Wait a minute. This actually may be a song about me written by some guy I don't even know. I'm stunned, and I am also very, very amused. Needless to say, this song becomes a huge hit in my house. We probably play it 27 play it for every guest that comes to the house, and every time we laugh uproariously. And it's not until maybe my 30th listen that I actually register how it ends. This guy sings, Brett Martin, I really like you. Will you be my friend? Will you call me on the phone? Brett Martin, here's my phone number. And he sings his actual phone number.

Brett Martin, here's my phone number.

603, 644. I have to admit, it takes me a few days to call. First of all, who calls anybody anymore? And who was this guy? But my daughters keep asking if I've called, and eventually my curiosity gets the better of me. So I finally pick up the phone, and I never could have expected what I'd find on the other end. What happens next is this week's Sunday Read, a piece I wrote for the magazine that's about what it's like to work at the intersection of art and commerce, what what it takes to make oneself visible in the never-ending river of content on platforms like Spotify that rule our culture, and how you make a life in a commercial art form. All of which are questions that nearly everybody I know who works in any medium finds themselves asking. So here's my article, read by Eric Jason Martin. Our audio producer today is Adrian Hearst, and the original music you'll hear was written and performed by Aaron Esposido.

I don't want to make this all about me, but have you heard the song, Brett Martin, you a nice man, yes? I guess probably not. On Spotify, Brett Martin, you a nice man, yes, has not yet accumulated enough streams to even register a tally, despite an excessive number of plays in at least one household that I can personally confirm. Even I, the titular Nice Man, didn't hear the one minute, 14 second song until last summer, a full 11 years after it was uploaded by an artist credited as Paparazzi and the Futtogs. I like to think this is because of a heroic lack of vanity though it may just be evidence of very poor search skills. When I did stumble on Brett Martin, You a Nice Man, yes, I naturally assumed it was about a different, more famous Brett Martin. Perhaps Brett Martin the left-handed reliever who until recently played for the Texas Rangers, or Brett Martin, the legendary Australian squash player, or even Clara Brett Martin, the Canadian who in 1897 became the British Empire's first female lawyer. Only when the singer began referencing details of stories that I made for public radio's This American Life, almost 20 years ago, did I realize it actually was about me.

The song ended, I really like you. Will you be my friend? Will you call me on the phone? Then it gave a phone number with a New Hampshire area code. So I called. It's possible that I dialed with outsize expectations. The author of this song, whoever he was, had been waiting 11 long years as his message in a bottle bobbed on the digital seas. Now, at long last, here I was. I spent serious time thinking about how to open the conversation, settling on what I imagined was something simple but iconic on in the order of Dr. Livingston, I presume. After one ring, a male voice answered. I said, This is Brett Martin. I'm sorry it's taken me so long to call. The man had no idea who I was. You have to understand, he said apologetically, I've written over 24,000 songs. I wrote 50 songs yesterday. And thus was I ushered into the strange universe of Matt Farley. Farley is 45 and lives with his wife, two sons, and a Cockapoo named Pippie in Denver, Massachusetts, on the North shore. For the past 20 years, he has been releasing album after album of songs with the object of producing a result to match nearly anything anybody could think to search for.

These include hundreds of songs namechecking celebrities, from the very famous to the much less so. He doesn't give out his phone number in all of them, but he does spread it around enough that he gets several calls or texts a week. Perhaps sensing my deflation, he assured me that very few came from the actual subject of a song. He told me the director Dennis Dugan of Dennis Dugan, I Like Your Movies, Very A Lot, part of an '83 song album about movie directors, called once. But he didn't realize who it was until too late, and the conversation was awkward. Freed from blinding incandescence of my own name, I could suddenly see the extent of what I had stumbled into. It was like the scene in a thriller when the detective first gaces on the wall of a serial killer's lair. Paparazzi and the Fattogs is only one of about 80 pseudonyms Farley uses to release his music. As the hungry food band, he sings songs about foods. As the guy who sings songs about cities and towns, he sings The Atlas. He has 600 songs inviting different named girls to the prom, and 500 that are marriage proposals.

He has an album of very specific apologies. Albums devoted to sports teams in every city that is a sports team, hundreds of songs about animals and jobs and weather and furniture, and one band that is simply called The Guy Who Sings Your Name Over and Over. He also has many, many songs about going to the bathroom. If you have a child under 10 with access to the internet, it is very likely you know some part of this body of work. What he refers to collectively as his poop songs are mostly released under two names, The Toilet Bowl Cleaners and The odd Man Who sings about poop, puke, and pee. The odd man is more shameful, he explained. The toilet bowl cleaners are making statements with their albums, though the distinction between the former's butt cheeks, butt cheeks, butt cheeks, and the latter's, I need a lot of toilet paper to clean the poop in my butt. Maybe subtler than he imagines. Largely, though not entirely on the strength of such songs, Farley has managed to achieve that most elusive of goals, a decent living creating music. In 2008, his search engine optimization project took in $3,000.

Four years later, it had grown to $24,000. The introduction of Alexa and her voice-activated sistron opened up the there to for underserved non-typing market, in particular, the kind fond of shouting things like, Poop in my Fingernails, at the computer. Poop and My Fingernails, by the Toilet Bowl Cleaners, currently has over 4.4 million streams on Spotify alone. To date, that band and the odd man who sings about poop, puke, and pee have collectively brought in approximately $469,000 from various platforms. They are by far Farley's biggest earners, but not the only ones. Paparazzi and the Fittogs has earned $41,000. The Best Birthday Song Band ever, $38,000, the guy who sings your name over and over, $80,000. Dozens of others have taken in two, three, or four digits. The New Orleans Sports Band, the Chicago Sports Band, the singing Film Critic, the Great Weather Song Person, the Paranormal Song Warrior, the Motern Media holiday singers who perform 70 versions of We Wish You a Merry Christmas, substituting contemporary foods for Figgy Pudding. It adds up. Farley quit his day job in 2017. People like to criticize the whole streaming thing, but There's really a lot of pros to it, he said.

Indeed, in 2023, his music earned him just shy of $200,000, about one half penny at a time. Farley's earnings helped fund his multiple other creative endeavors. He records what he calls his No Jokes music. This includes a two-man band he's been in since college called Moes Haven, which once recorded an album a day for a year. He hosts two podcasts, one about his work and the other recapping Celtics games. And he makes movies, microbudgeted, determinately amateur, but nevertheless recognizably cinematic features, starring himself and his family and friends. They feature a spectacular array of New England accents. In most, Farley plays some version of himself, a mild-mannered, eccentric hero, projecting varying degrees of menace. Farley and his college friend, Charlie Roxberg, are in the midst of a project in which they have resolved to release two full movies per year. The model, Farley said, was inspired by Hallmark movies. If this movie stinks, good news. We're making another in six months. Their most popular work remains Don't Let the River Beast Get You. 2012, a charmingly shaggy tale of a crypted, threatening a small New England town. It features Farley's father as a big game hunter named Edo Hootkins.

Like many of Farley's endeavors, his films have attracted a small but intense following. I could fill a 5,000-seat arena if I could only get everybody in one place, he says. His is the obsessive project that seems to inspire the same from others. A few years ago, Lior Galil, a Chicago music writer, set out to listen to Farley's entire corpus from start to finish, chronicling the journey in a zine titled Freaky for Farley. Four pages into issue one, he had already taken on the grim tone of an Arctic explorer. I've become a little tired of the album, 25 songs in, he wrote, which makes me concerned about my ability to get through the rest of this listening quest. Issue 2 begins. I fail world. The umbrella name that Farley uses for all his outputs is Motern. He made the word up, or rather, he seized on what he felt was its strange power after misspelling the word intern in what he had planned to be a 10,000 1,000-page novel. To Farley, creativity has always been a volume business. That, in fact, is the gist of The Motern Method, a 136-page manifesto on creativity that he self-published in 2021.

His theory is that every idea, no matter its apparent value, must be honored and completed. An idea thwarted is an insult to the muse and is punished accordingly. If you reject your own ideas, then the part of the brain that comes up with ideas is going to stop, he said. You just do it and do it and do it and you sort it out later. Or as the case may be, you don't, but rather send it all out into the abyss, hoping that someday Somebody, somewhere, will hear it. At New York Times cooking, we believe that you shouldn't have to run to the grocery store every time you want to make something delicious. I'm Melissa Clarke, and my recipe for the most adaptable one bowl cornmeal pound cake is a comforting loaf cake that you can have fresh out of the oven in under an hour using ingredients you probably already have on hand. Andiced, toasted, and buttered, it's practically a bread, so it gives you a pass to eat cake for breakfast. You can find so many easy, flexible country recipes like this one at nytcooking. Com. Nytcooking has you covered with recipes, advice, and inspiration for any occasion.

I was aware, of course, that on some level I'd been had. The one tiny fish vain enough to be snared in Farley's trawl. It left me a bit paranoid. Charlie Rocksberg suddenly seemed like such a perfect Boston pseudonym that I spent a day investigating whether he was a real person. He's real, lives in Connecticut, and makes corporate videos for his day job. I lost another day chasing after a letterboxed commenter who goes by the handle DCS577 and was so baffled by the popularity of Farley's movies that he published his own short e-book, The Not Motern Method. It urges readers to give up on their artistic dreams and even mimics Farley's buckshot SEO by appearing in multiple slightly different versions. Sure Actually, he had to be a Farley alter ego. Nope, a 36-year-old movie buff in Missouri. Mostly, I was trying to figure out whether I thought Farley was a bad guy. Did his scheme represent the inevitable cynical end product of a culture in the grips of algorithmic platforms? Or might it be a delightful side effect? Was his work spam or a outsider art? Was he just the poop song guy? Or was he closer to Steve Keen, the Brooklyn-based Gennex hipster-approved painter of over 300,000 works who has been the subject of books and museum retrospectives?

As it happens, Farley has a song about Steve Keen. It's on a paparazzi album titled I Am Not Wasting My Life, which suggested he was asking some of the same questions. When I went to Danvers to meet Farley in December, it became quickly apparent that he is the most transparent person in the world. He's got a thick head of hair, high cheekbones, and a friendly Kyle Chandler-like face that none other letterboxed reviewer correctly identified as youth pastry. When he picked me up at my hotel, he was wearing a fleece-lined brown hoodie that, judging by social media, is the only outer layer he wears throughout the New England winter, including on the 15 to 20 mile walks he takes twice a week. He struck me as the guy who wears shorts the moment it gets above 48 degrees. Compulsively early, he confessed that he arrived at the lobby an hour before we were scheduled to meet. You might mistake Motern's esthetic for stoner humor, but Farley says he has never had a sip of alcohol, much less done drugs. By his own description, he eats like a picky twelve-year-old. When I made him take me to a restaurant in Salem called Dube's Seafood, famed for its belly clams, he ordered chicken nuggets and buried them beneath a blizzard of salt and ground pepper, removing the top of the pepper shaker to pour it on more directly.

In the car, we listened to the Rolling Stones, the Replacements, Tom Waits. It's a mammoth accomplished establishment of self control for me not to be playing my own music right now, he said, though his efforts at restraint were puzzling, given that I was in all likelihood the one person on Earth at that moment whose job was to listen to it. All of Farley's life, he has wanted to make things and have people see and hear them. After going to school at Providence College, he moved to Manchester, New Hampshire, specifically because he knew nobody there who might distract him. If you know people, they want you to go to cookouts. He says, I designed my entire life to not have to go to cookouts. Even now, he cannot abide downtime. To him, the wasted time of a party or watching a football ball game is measured in songs or scripts he could have written. At no point did Farley consider a more conventional route, such as film school or a low-level job in the entertainment industry. Instead, he took a job at a group home for teenagers, knocking out a 40-hour week in three days so that he could work on music and movies, the other four.

He would leave Moeshaven CDs in public places across Manchester, hoping somebody would pick them up. He slipped them into the stacks at local record stores like a reverse shoplifter. He would drive people to the airport just so he could force his music on them on the way. Farley's persona is simultaneously grandiose. I really You think I'm the greatest songwriter of the 21st century, he told me, and knowingly self-effacing. One night, I went with him to a tiny independent theater in Lexington for a screening of the Motern film Magic Spot, a time travel comedy. On the drive down, I asked what the end game for the movies was. Obviously, they have a very different business model from his music. What if somebody gave him, say, a million dollars to make his next movie? He thought for a second. 300,000 for me and Charlie. Spread the rest around to the people who have helped us all these years. Make a $10,000 movie and get sued, he said. That would be about twice the budget of a typical Motern joint. Magic Spot wasn't on the marquee when we pulled up, but there was a flyer taped to the door.

We couldn't afford color copies, but we did our best, the theater owner said as he let us in. There were 11 people in the audience, including Farley's father and brother-in-law, both of whom were in the movie. There was also a film student named Taylor, who had driven up from the Cape for the second of three Motern screenings he'd see within a month, and two guys down from Manchester, one of whom was turning the other on to the Farley canon. A few minutes into the movie, the sound went out, and we sat for about 10 minutes while Farley frantically tried to fix it. He was on the verge of jury-rigging a solution involving holding a microphone to his laptop when the sound system miraculously healed itself. A huge success. I'm on cloud nine, he said as we headed back toward Denver's. After the show, he refused accept his share of the ticket sales, instead pressing extra money into the owner's hands as thanks. For somebody so driven to find an audience and so immune to embarrassment, the advent of the digital age was a miracle. Farley began uploading the Moes Haven catalog to iTunes when it came out and then to Spotify.

As described in the closely autobiographical Motern film, Local Legends, Moes Haven was intended to meld the sounds of Bob Dylan, Van Morissen, and Pink Floyd into a musical concoction that was going to blow the minds of millions of fans all the way around the world. As it turned out, Farley noticed that the only song that seemed to blow minds, or at least get downloaded, was a comic throwaway called Shut Up, Your Monkey. Get Down, Get Funky, Shut Up, Your Monkey. Some people would have quit right there, he says. I saw an opportunity. A A lot of energy has been spent trying to pick the lock of the recommendation algorithms that can make or break a song on Spotify and other streaming services. Any number of online courses, distributors, and publishing companies promise to navigate the labyrinth of inputs. Playlist inclusion, natural language processing, average length of listens, influencer attention, metrics like, acousticness, speechiness, and danceability that will push a song onto millions of users' recommended playlists. Critics, meanwhile, bemoaned the rise of bands like Greta Van Fleet and Algorithmic Fever Dream, according to Pitchfork, who seemed to be engineered to be the next song after whatever it was you actually chose to listen to.

When I asked Farley how much of this he factors into his work, the answer was almost zero. He gets the sense that longer titles seem to work better than short ones, and that around a minute and a half is a good minimum length. But for the most part, his is a blunt force attack on the softer target of search results. At its most intentionally parasitic, this includes such tracks as a review of Exile on Main Street, designed to be discovered by the Rolling Stones Curious. A 2013 album credited to the passionate and objective Joker fan takes advantage of the fact that song titles cannot be copyrighted. Thus, This girl is on fire. Quick, grab a fire extinguisher. Almost instant karma, and Searching for Sugar Man, which unlike the more famous Sugar Man by Rodriguez, is about a baker whose sugar delivery is running late. Farley says he has since sworn off these kinds of tricks. These days, he sets himself a relatively light goal of one 50 song album a month recorded in a spare bedroom in his house. Fifty tracks is the limit that CD Baby, which Farley uses to distribute and manage his music, allows.

A regulation that may or may not have something to do with Farley, who used to put as many as 100 on an album. Once he reaches his quota, he begins the tedious work of checking the levels of each song, entering titles and metadata, genre, writer, length, etc. Creating an album title and cover art, nearly always a selfie, and uploading the package one song at a time. Farley showed me a worn green spiral notebook in which he meticulously tracks his output and earnings. From Spotify, he earns roughly a third of a cent per stream. Amazon and Apple pay slightly more on average, between a third and three quarters of a cent. Tiktok, on the other hand, pays musicians by the number of videos featuring their songs and is thus immune to Farley's strategy. When Chris and Kylie Jenner recorded a video of themselves dancing to Farley's song about Chris, millions of people saw it, but Farley earned less than one cent. Among other topics Farley told me he planned to tackle in future albums were colleges music, household items, tools, musical instruments. I had planned to ask what categories haven't worked, but what had become clear by then is that the idea of any one song or even album hitting the jackpot isn't the point.

Even after Spotify's recent announcement that it would no longer pay royalties on songs receiving fewer than a thousand streams, Farley's business model rests on the sheer bulk of his output. And so does his artistic model. Whatever the dubious value of any individual song in the Farley universe, it's as part of the enormous body of the whole, the Magnum Opus, that it gains power. This is especially true when you consider that an artificial intelligence could conceivably produce 24,000 songs, Farley's entire ouvre in about a day. A fact that gives his defiantly human, even artisanal labor, a lonely Sisyphean dignity Whatever else Farley's work is, it is not AI, even when it barely seems to be I. A year or two ago, Farley discovered with some chagrin that he was no longer the number one result for the search poop song. There was another poop song guy. His name is Teddy Casey, and amazingly, he is also from a Boston suburb, Newton. That's where the similarities with Farley stop. Casey has precisely two songs available for streaming, a sweet kid's song about animals called Monkey, and The Poopsong, which has over 4 million streams across various platforms.

Casey is 55. Until recently, he was working as a bartender and hosting open mic nights near where he lives in mid-coast Maine. When I reached him, he was back home after a week in New Hampshire, training to become a US Postal Service letter carrier. He wrote his poop song around 2009, but he didn't get around to posting it until 2020. It didn't do anything for months, he said. And then all of a sudden, one month, it made $20. I was like, Wow, cool. Buy a case of beer. These days, the song brings in about $1,200 per month, enough to pay his rent, Casey told me, with what sounded like a Labausky and shrug. I have other songs that I want to put up, he said, but I don't want to sell out. I asked if he knew about the toilet bowl cleaners, and he he'd heard a few of their songs. I'm not making this up, he said. There's this other guy. I don't know if you've heard of him, the odd man who sings about poop, puke, and pee. His idea was to customize every poop song. So there's a Steven poop song, a Bob poop song, a Mary poop song.

He's got hundreds. I told him that both bands were in fact the same person. Well, okay, he said, as if realizing the full extent of what he was up against. I like mine better, but I'm biased, he said, finally. You can tell he knows how to write songs, but I think he's just been going for volume. In fact, I knew about the suite of songs that combine Farley's two most successful genres, Names and Poop, because he was working on a new set of them when I visited him. He estimated that he had already completed about 3,000, but there were always new names. This can be painful, he warned, switching on his keyboard and firing up his laptop. He donned headphones, consulted a list of names, and got to work. In the silence of the room, I could just hear the soft click of the keyboard and his vocals. Jamila, poop, poop, poop, Jamila, poop, poop, poop. In Local Heroes, which is something like Farley's All That Jazz, there is a fantasy sequence in which Farley imagines the two sides of his personality arguing. One, the serious, heartfelt artist. The other, a greasy record executive demanding evermore poop songs.

Of course, the scene can only be a fantasy and can only have Farley playing both characters because the greasy record executive belongs to a lost world, one in which drastically fewer people had a chance to produce art, and the work was often corrupted by corporate gatekeepers, but in which there was also a clearly marked road to an audience and a living. Farley represents both the best and worst of the incentives and opportunities that have taken this world's place. Certainly, there are few creators working today in any medium who would not recognize the anxiety he embodies, that their work now lives or dies by the vagaries of opaque algorithms serving a bottomless menu of options to an increasingly distracted public, and that if they don't bow to the demands of these new realities, their work, and by extension, they, will simply disappear. Which is to say that while the experience of watching Farley work was not unpainful, as promised, neither was it totally unfamiliar. After a minute and a half of the Jamila poop song, Farley paused. He adjusted a few dials, consulted his notebook, thought for a few seconds, and plowed on to the next song.

Different tempo, different vocals, similar theme. Tunk a, tunk a, he sang. Poop, poop, poop, poop, poop.